98 LITERARY VALUES 



true, as with the lawyer, the doctor, the man of 

 science, the critic of old texts and documents — 

 is one thing. Criticism of literature and art, in- 

 volving questions of taste, style, poetic and artistic 

 values, is quite another, and demands quite other 

 powers. In the former case it is mainly judicial, 

 dispassionate, impersonal ; in the latter case the 

 sympathies and special predilections are more in- 

 volved. We seek more or less to interpret the im- 

 aginative writer, to draw out and emphasize his 

 special quality and stimulus, to fuse him and restate 

 him in other terms ; and in doing this we give our- 

 selves more freely. We cannot fully interpret what 

 we do not love, and love has eyes the judgment 

 knows not of. What a man was born to say, what 

 he speaks out of his most radical selfhood, — that 

 the same fate and power in you can alone fully 

 estimate and interpret. 



VI 



One's search after the truth in subjective matters 

 is more or less a search after one's self, after what 

 is agreeable to one's constitutional bias or innate 

 partialities. We do not see the thing as it is in 

 itself so much as we see it as it stands related to 

 our individual fragment of existence. The lesson 

 we are slowest to learn and to act upon is the rela- 

 tivity of truth in all these matters, or that it is 

 what we make it. It is a product of the mind, as 

 the apple is of the tree. We get one kind of truth 

 from Eenan, another from Taine, still another from 



